my web programming journey (so far)

HTML 4.0 way back in 2000. Played around for a while, put up some stuff on Tripod, and then gave up. (Stupid, stupid)

Heard about Python from a colleague at work in 2013

Learn Python the Hard Way (v2.7) – great introduction to the basics of Python, and also tries to set up your mindset for programming in general (memorisation, getting you to search for answers, structuring code)

Tango with Django (v1.5), now 1.7 beta is available – pretty deep for something aimed at a newbie to Django. Introduces quite a few concepts in Django but also touches AJAX, git and deployment on Pythonanywhere (small plug: appreciate it if you use this link to sign up so I can get referral bonuses!), which I am currently using.

Djangogirlstutorial – a lot lighter than Tango with Django (and hence faster to finish – I suggest going through this first) and updated for 1.7.

Learnt SQL for use at work (the language, not the database)

Djangogirls tutorial extensions – Extra lessons for the aforementioned tutorial. A little less maintained though, they seem to still on 1.5 for this. The most useful for me was the introduction to PostgreSQL

With the info learnt, was able to put up an incredibly basic site with Semantic UI – since I thought I’d try something different from the usual Bootstrap. Some of it was cool, but there aren’t many resources. This paid video series by Tuts+ is a pretty good introduction, and was also my first real introduction to CSS media queries.

Decided to move to Bootstrap since there are a lot more resources (ok, startbootstrap was the trigger). Semantic has since up-versioned (finally v1.0+), so for new projects I may look at it again. Yay, pretty site:

I wish I could list out more of the intricacies now – the Googles, the stackoverflows – because so much of this you have to find out yourself. Maybe one day I will start writing my own tutorials. For now, I have a long list #tolearn – thought I’d make it public as well.

Also big thanks to friends (some doing very well now, congrats!) who I could ping off stupid questions.